Read The Slow Road Online

Authors: Jerry D. Young

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic, #Two Hours or More (65-100 Pages)

The Slow Road (5 page)

BOOK: The Slow Road
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Besides the wood stove and oven, and the side burners, Jasper piped water to the structure and put in a small sink that drained into a bucket that could be emptied into the cleanout for the sewer line at the back of the trailer, or used to water the garden. There was a large flat work surface for the food preparation activities. The entire structure had half height walls and a roof. The area between them was fiberglass screen to keep the bugs out but allow circulation.

Fortunately he’d built the thing so the additions he decided on in the middle of the project worked right in with almost no modification of the original construction. At the south end of the brick structure Jasper mounted a large C-band parabolic dish he got for free from one of the neighbors that had switched to cable vision. He cleaned it and painted it with reflective paint.

Above the focus point of the dish Jasper built a large multiple tray solar dehydrator. It had screened sides, enclosed at a distance with light plywood to allow air circulation all around the trays. A piece of heavy metal was suspended at the very bottom that the reflector focused the sunlight on, heating it up to provide low heat to help dry the items on the trays.

At the north end of the outdoor kitchen Jasper built a small wood burning pit that was piped to a tall smoker assembly. They would be able to smoke and cure some of the meat they were producing. All the hickory wood that was Jasper’s cut of the firewood he and Alvin cut every year was consigned for use in the smoker.

The smoker didn’t get used at all that winter, though Millie and Jasper were able to get a few trays of fruits dried in the dehydrator. The next year both additions got as much use as the canning kitchen. Jasper bought a heavy duty manual meat grinder and ground up the entire deer he took during hunting season and made jerky strips out of it with a kit from Cabela’s.

Without any really expensive projects going, Millie and Jasper had the money to buy a whole hog and a half of a beef which they processed by jerking, canning, curing, and smoking, with Jasper making sure he did his share of the work.

The entire electrical system in the US was getting old and overloaded. Millie and Jasper began to find themselves out of power on a fairly regular basis. They shopped and shopped for a small generator, but just could not find one with the capability they wanted for a price they were willing to pay.

They spent more than one night in the shelter when the power was out during a one-hundred-plus degree heat wave. With the thick walls of the shelter the temperature stayed below seventy even during the sustained heat.

With the nearly unlimited irrigation water they had available their garden and orchard thrived even with the high temps. Millie bought a second canner that summer and several more cases of jars, with the additional money they had available from her new side business at the consignment shop, since the money wasn’t going to big projects.

She had run across a home business idea on-line and fell in love with the idea. She talked to Jasper about it and they saved up for three months to purchase a #10 can lid sealing machine, along with a case of cans, and some blank computer labels from the website. The business was packaging small gifts in the cans and selling them. A person could select items at the consignment shop to put in the can, or bring their own items to be canned.

Millie also sewed items to can for pre-made gifts. The business wasn’t all that lucrative until the sealer was paid for, but after that it was gravy. And the side benefit was that Millie and Jasper began dry canning much of the food they dehydrated and jerked, using oxygen absorbers in the cans for long term storage. They didn’t bother with the fancy computer generated self stick labels for their own canning, just marking the contents and date of the canning directly on the cans with an indelible marker.

They were also finally able to make a couple of double payments on the mortgage, though it was for only two months. They went into 2008 in the best physical shape they’d either ever been in, and also the best shape financially. They didn’t have much of a savings, but they were able to set aside a small emergency stash of cash for just-in-case emergencies.

They were producing most of their own food, buying only staples at the store. Millie had always wanted to buy in bulk to save money, but had never been able to do so. They always seemed to need a little of a lot of things all the time.

But now, with food put by, Millie began grocery shopping only once a month, for the staples they needed. She had been buying the powdered whole milk that Jasper liked from a long term storage food source and after talking it over with Jasper; they invested in a Country Living grain mill and bought a #10 can of hard red winter wheat for Millie to start experimenting with.

She had baked bread from time to time using commercial flour, but they usually bought the seven-grain wheat bread both of them liked. It took a while and another can of the wheat for Millie to get the hang of making the whole wheat bread in the outdoor kitchen wood fired oven. But they finally switched over completely to the homemade bread from home ground flour. They bought a six-gallon Super Pail of the wheat for immediate use, and another for storage.

Millie baked once a week, and with the nutrition of the bread, they had one day a week where they ate only a whole loaf of bread apiece, and had only water to drink. Both seemed to be healthier as their diet had changed over to home grown foods.

Jasper and Millie both liked honey in their hot tea, and had been buying the small containers for a long time. But the more they read on the internet about the benefits of natural raw honey; they became convinced that it was what they wanted to start using.

Both wanted to get beehives to ensure good pollination of the garden and orchard, but Millie was allergic to the stings and they couldn’t take the chance. The garden and orchard were doing fine with the natural bee population so Jasper started looking around the area for someone with honeybee hives that would trade raw, unprocessed honey for labor. If he could get several five-gallon buckets of it, they would have enough to last them for years.

He finally found someone through Alvin. It didn’t surprise Jasper very much when Alvin went along and paid cash for four buckets of the honey when Jasper collected his after working part time for six months around the man’s large farming operation doing odd jobs and mechanic work. The honey was stored in the shelter. Millie would transfer a little each month for use that month, from the bucket to a stainless steel honey canister that Jasper had found for her.

The two years had passed since Millie’s first miscarriage and she and Jasper again let nature take its course. If she got pregnant again, fine. If she didn’t, well… that was God’s will. They were trying.

And it worked. Millie again found herself two months pregnant at Christmas time. And it was going to be twins. Jasper began looking for a decent paying day job so he could be with Millie during more normal hours.

He had been applying for a job with the county maintenance crew every time an opening came up for several years. But Harry Harleson had been a county commissioner for years. He and Jasper had been mortal enemies since high school. Jasper was sure that Harry kept him from getting any county job.

Harry lost his seat on the commission amidst a slew of accusations of wrong doing. Jasper’s application was approved for a job on the county maintenance crew a week after he put it in for the newest open position. Not only was Jasper pay going to be significantly higher, he would get medical and retirement benefits.

But Millie and Jasper gave up on ever building their dream home. They were going to have to do something. The forty-foot park model trailer was soon going to be too small for the family.

The two had long talks about the situation and finally came up with a plan. Again, it certainly wasn’t their dream house, but it would be much better than what they had. Never one to laze around, except on Sundays, after the animals were taken care of, Jasper started two new major projects.

Millie had been after him for a long time to find a day job, since the graveyard shift was so hard on him. He was putting in the same number of hours, with the projects going, but he began to look a bit better and wasn’t as tired all the time the way he had been before, despite the equal hours of work.

The first project Jasper hoped to finish before the birth of the babies and it got both financial and time priority. They were going to need a vehicle with a rear seat once the babies came and Jasper and Millie knew exactly what they wanted. And Jasper knew how to get it. The same garage where he had built the pickup was more than willing to get his part time help for the use of the garage for him to build a new vehicle.

It went well, and quickly, as Jasper was basically building a rig identical to the pickup, except it would have the body of a Suburban when he was finished. Another reinforced and gusseted frame from a wrecked pickup. Another Pontiac Super Duty 455 engine. Another five fuel tanks. The Suburban body was a year younger than the pickup, but the design had not changed cosmetically in the two years

When he was done two weeks before Millie’s due date a person looking at the vehicles from the front wouldn’t be able to tell which was which. Since the raw material was available in the form of another wrecked one ton pickup, Jasper went ahead and made a second trailer, also nearly identical to the first one he’d made for the pickup, including built in fuel tanks to extend the range of the towing vehicle.

When he wasn’t working for the county, getting all the overtime he could get, or working on the Suburban, Jasper was preparing the property around the park model trailer for additions to be added to the trailer.

The work would be done in several stages, as money and time permitted. Jasper and Millie’s goal was to have the first half of the construction done before the babies turned two and the second half done before they were three.

They managed the feat, even on the accelerated schedule they adopted when Millie got pregnant with their third child a year after the twins were born. Jasper was able to apply all his spare time to the house project after the Suburban was done. Always the horse trader, Jasper acquired most of the materials he needed for the construction by trading labor for them, though the garden, orchard, and animals were making enough to help defray some of the cash costs.

Jasper got the footings poured and the piers and foundation built for the expansion on all four sides of the existing park model trailer. The ends were only being extended slightly. No living space, just the same exterior treatment the entire structure got as it was completed.

The space enclosures were basic good house building with twelve inch insulated walls and a hipped roof that covered the entire three sections of the house, with a generous overhang all around.

But the additions for better security were the main components of extra expense. Using techniques that Joel Skousen had developed that Jasper read about on the internet, Jasper added a bullet resistant half height wall from the ground to the level of the bottoms of the windows. The addition tapered from twelve inches thick at the bottom to eighteen inches at the top. It was made of steel studs and steel horizontal structural elements and went around the entire structure. The cavity made by the sloped structure faced with steel siding was filled with three-quarter inch minus washed gravel.

The conventional windows were covered with Lexan sheets, that while not bullet proof, would maintain their integrity if holed by a bullet. The bullet might break the glass behind the Lexan, but there would still be a window. For additional protection Jasper made working shutters for the windows that could be closed from the inside. They were made of three one-quarter-inch panels of tempered steel sandwiched with two layers of five-eighths marine plywood.

Again, not bullet proof against heavy rounds, they would stop smaller rounds and shotgun blasts. Jasper wasn’t worried about bullet holes in the area above the gravel wall. They could be easily patched. Glass windows couldn’t, thus the Lexan, which could. The doors were built in the same manner as the shutters, with additional shutters that could be closed over the doors.

The slight reverse taper of the projectile resistant wall coupled with the wide overhang of the steep pitch metal roof resulted in a striking looking dwelling that still met all building codes.

Besides being protected fairly well from projectiles all around Jasper plumbed in some used pipe and sprinkler heads on the roof and under eaves. The roof and walls could be washed down with water in the event of a natural fire, or an attack with Molotov cocktails.

The innocuous looking vents in the top layer of the three full block plus cap block foundation wall and gravel wall were built by Jasper to swing open easily from under the house so they could be used as gun ports. There was the normal steel access door in the foundation in the back wall for under-house access, but there were also two trapdoors in each of the new front and back sections of the structure to access the area, just as there were two places to gain access to the attic for minor, lightweight storage.

Though they kept the propane furnace that was in the park model trailer, Jasper installed an outdoor wood burning furnace to provide heat for the completed house. Even the homebuilt redwood hot tub on the new covered rear wooden deck didn’t use propane. It was wood fired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

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The construction, when completed, gave Jasper, Millie, and their children five nice bedrooms, two full baths plus the original small bath of the park model trailer, as well as two storage rooms, a real laundry room, and a large living room. All at a tenth of the cost of having a much smaller and less protective home built, even a manufactured home.

Jasper and Millie had an open house for their few friends after the final touches had been added to the house. Though simple and plain by almost all standards, the house impressed their friends for the fact that they had done it themselves, for a ridiculously low cash outlay, though they didn’t know exactly how much. They just all knew what Jasper did for a living and he couldn’t have had much to work with, especially after the babies were born and Millie gave up her jobs to stay home with them.

The only comment approaching negativity was one about how small the back yard was now with all the garden and yard buildings. Jasper smiled an inward smile. Alvin’s wife didn’t have a clue. It was more than worth it for Jasper, Millie, and the children.

Alvin took Jasper aside and asked for a tour of the rest of the place, without his wife along. Jasper had a quick word with Millie and slipped out the back door with Alvin. In the years that they had been working together gathering firewood, hunting, and the occasional helping hand at Alvin’s, Alvin had never really looked over the property.

Jasper looked at Alvin about halfway through the quick tour. Alvin’s mouth was open and he was looking around in awe. And that was before Jasper took him into the “storage shed” shelter.

Alvin was acute enough to recognize the thick walls and right angle turn into the space for what they were. Elements of a fallout shelter. Just before they went back inside the house, Alvin stopped Jasper and said, “I don’t want to sound superior or something, but how did you do all this? I make ten times what you do and I don’t have a fraction of what you have, in terms of taking care of me and my family. You have a full fledged fallout shelter, for heaven’s sake!”

“You know me, Alvin,” Jasper said softly. “I just take things as they come and do what I can, one project at a time.”

“And work hard all the time. I don’t think I could do it. But I’m worried about the future. The world situation. Global warming. All that. I can’t get Alice interested. All Lance cares about is his motorcycle and iPod. The girls love the horses and take good care of them, but what will I do if things go bad? Look at what happened when the subprime lending market collapsed. I lost almost a million dollars I had invested. It cut my net worth in half.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Alvin. I’d certainly be glad to help in any way I can, but I sure don’t know what to tell you about getting your family on board. It’s never been a problem with me. Millie has been right there, pitching in right from the start.”

“Yeah. You’re lucky there. She’s a trooper.”

Jasper was 31, Millie 30, and the youngest child was two at the time of the open house. Much to Millie’s relief, primarily fear of Jasper having a heart attack, Jasper slowed down some, to spend more time with the children. They would start home schooling the twins in another year.

But Jasper was Jasper and he needed a project to work on. They’d never found a suitable generator and Jasper wanted reliable, constant power for a few things. What Jasper did was begin to accumulate cheap LED lights and used deep cycle batteries whenever he could get his hands on either. Then, as finances permitted he bought solar battery trickle chargers for the batteries. He set up a battery with solar trickle charger in each of the buildings, to provide light when needed.

He also wanted power for the computer so he set up another system in the house to use with the 12 volt power cord that came with the computer. He added several of the LED light fixtures in the house and shelter, with their own batteries and solar trickle chargers.

Though they only used a little propane in the house kitchen range and hot water heater, when Jasper found a used thousand gallon aboveground propane tank he traded for it and made arrangements to have it moved to the property. He set it directly over the buried tank and slowly began to fill both, buying a hundred gallons of propane a month, year round, until both tanks were full.

The tank had come from a farm and had a wet leg so Jasper could fill propane tanks from the new tank. He began to scrounge some up, cleaning and painting them, getting those that needed it recertified and modern valves installed until he had almost another five hundred gallons of propane in portable tanks ranging in size from twenty pounders to one-hundred pounders. He didn’t really have a use for them, but the opportunity had presented itself, so he took advantage of it.

He did find a use for some of them, losing several in the process. The blizzard and ice storm of several years previously had been called a once in a thousand years storm. The one the area got the winter of 2011/2012 put it to shame.

With Millie and the children safe and sound at home, Jasper, in his position with the county, again helped out getting supplies to people and people to shelter using one of the county trucks until it ran dry. Alvin was in the process of getting a new truck and had sold the Dodge one-ton with dump bed, so didn’t have anything that would move during the bad weather. Jasper picked Alvin and his family up and took them into town to the shelter.

Jasper trusted Alvin to drive Jasper’s pickup, so took him home to pick up it and the trailer so he could help with the rescue efforts. When they were taking a break at one of the shelters Alvin told Jasper, “I always kind of felt sorry for you having such old vehicles. I had no idea what you had were in such good shape and so capable.”

Jasper smiled. “They do okay.”

They dropped the conversation when a very tired looking deputy came over and asked them to deliver some hay to one of the local farmers, and pick up a family that got stranded on the highway trying to make it in to the shelter. “We just don’t have anything left suitable for the jobs.”

Jasper and Alvin split up and carried out the tasks they’d been asked to do. They kept it up for five full days, with the sad task of picking up some bodies of people that had died because of the severe weather.

Alvin was a bit green around the gills when they dropped the bodies off at the county morgue, each one having brought in three bodies in the trailers.

Millie was glad to see Jasper get home, but they’d been snug and secure. Millie still worried about Jasper’s heart due to his father’s chronic heart problems, and Jasper’s several years of hard drinking.

Fuel had jumped to over five dollars a gallon since Jasper had helped during the last blizzard. He submitted a request to have the fuel he’d used in his two vehicles replaced. The county, thankful for the help, agreed. It was two months before Jasper got the fuel, but he did get it. The same couldn’t be said for a few of the small propane tanks he’d handed out to people that had run out of propane because of running their furnaces at full blast for such a long time.

But both vehicles were full when the gasoline became available. Jasper kept them that way most of the time. So with the thought of future supplies of fuel in mind, Jasper went shopping for an inexpensive gasoline tank and stand. He couldn’t find one so went to TSC again. They had one. The manager of the store was one of the people that Jasper had helped and cut him a good deal on the tank, stand, and dispenser.

With the tank set up near the propane tank, Jasper had the truck delivering fuel to the county put his two hundred gallons in the new tank, plus three hundred more that Jasper paid for out of the money he knew he would be making during the clean up.

He misjudged the situation slightly and he and Millie ran tight on cash when Jasper couldn’t do as much of the cleanup for individuals, which paid better than the county overtime, which Jasper was putting in doing cleanup on behalf of the county.

But he had it and kept the tank topped off religiously the same way he’d always kept the vehicles topped off. It was easier now, since he could refuel at home every day and get a gasoline delivery every month to keep the tank between half full and full.

As bad as that winter was, the summer turned out to be much worse. Jasper had never really believed much in global warming, especially with the recent severe winter weather, but he was starting to change his mind after the temperatures began hitting the one-hundred’s in late June and didn’t drop significantly until late September of that year.

He spent quite a bit of overtime for the county delivering water and ice to many of the same people that he’d delivered food and water to during the blizzards. He also brought many of them in to cooling shelters if they had no air conditioning or couldn’t run it when the power was out. Which it was often, again.

Then that fall he did much the same thing due to heavy rains that began to cause flooding in the area, including his residential neighborhood. The property was on a gentle upslope from the street. At its worst, the water came to within two inches of getting into the house and over the deck, and just covered the garden with an inch or so. The alley was right at the upper level of the flood water. At least it wasn’t a raging flood. The water was moving, but slowly, as it rose.

Millie sweated the rising water out. Even if the water did get into the house, she could still take the children across the deck, onto the outdoor kitchen mound which was an extension of the shelter mound. There was still more than a foot of freeboard for the outdoor kitchen and the shelter.

Jasper honored his duty for the county and worked, taking only enough time to raise a sand bag revetment in front of the entrance of the shelter, giving another two feet of protection to the shelter itself, above the mound.

He didn’t think that would happen, for before it reached the floor level of the shelter the water should be running over the alley and down that side of the slope. There just wasn’t much way for the water to rise more than a couple of inches higher than the alley. He also moved the chicken tractor and henhouse up on the small open area of the shelter mound to keep them out of the water.

The rains continued for a week, with the flooding lasting for several days after the rain stopped. Jasper was only getting home for a meal and few hours of sleep before he went back on duty. The flooding had played havoc with the county roads and all the county crews were putting in overtime to try to get them repaired as the flood water slowly went down.

Millie killed over a dozen snakes that found refuge on the family islands. She didn’t even try to differentiate between helpful snakes and the dangerous cottonmouths that were common in the area. She also drove off several larger, less dangerous animals, though she did kill a couple of possums and raccoons that became aggressive when she tried to herd them back into the water.

They lost much of the garden, as the flood came during the height of the harvest, but with their stored reserves they didn’t want for food. They chose to eat on the stored foods and sell or give away the small amount of produce they got after the water went down and Jasper was able to mud his way through the garden in tall rubber boots to recover everything he could when he finally got a few daytime hours off.

With all the overtime Jasper was making, Millie was able to make two more double mortgage payments and still have money left to have a nice Holiday season that fall. They talked it over and decided to build up some cash reserves again, putting the increased salary from Jasper’s promotion to crew chief of one of the maintenance crews.

Millie was still able to pick up a Super Pail or two every month of long term storage staples. And though they’d always kept plenty of toilet paper in the house, Millie began to double buy it at the buyer’s club they were now members of, and stacked it in the attic of the house. There was plenty in the shelter and Millie and Jasper both thought with the rodent proofing Jasper had done when he built onto the park model trailer, plus poison out in the attic, the paper products would be safe from rodent and bug infestations.

Jason had two more projects he wanted to do, while there was still space in the back yard. He’d guttered the roof of the house, piping the run off toward the street, since the rear of the property was higher. He hated loosing that much water, so rented a tiny excavator and dug a hole to put in a seven-hundred-fifty gallon stock water tank for a cistern to catch the roof runoff.

That was one half of one of the projects. The other half was an identical cistern buried beside the well. Jasper had obtained a couple of small electrical centrifugal pumps that didn’t cost too much to run at the low volumes they pumped. The system allowed Jasper to run the gas engine pump to fill the garden cistern and do the actual irrigation with one of the low flow pumps out of the cistern.

The other pump was in the roof catchment cistern so the water could be pumped to the garden cistern or directly to the garden for irrigation if more rain came than the cistern would hold without pumping it. And it gave a couple of options that Jasper liked to have for their water usage.

The city water system was very old and in the past year the water had been off several times for repairs to the system. It didn’t bother Millie and Jasper much, as they had stored water in addition to the hand pump on the well if they needed it.

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